Recording and watching people's dreams has been the subject of mind-bending films like 'Until the End of the World,' 'Total Recall,' 'Strange Days', 'Minority Report' and more recent hits like 'Inception' and 'Captain Marvel'.

But the concept is no longer just far-fetched science fiction. It's something sleep scientists have worked toward in recent years - and it now appears they are fine-tuning the process.

Independent dream researcher Daniel Oldis recently composed a 'dream team' of sleep and dream researchers from across the nation.

He told freelance tech writer Tessa Love that the team will run human test trials for developing dream-recording tech inside a Burbank, California, recording studio next summer.

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A a 'dream team' of sleep and dream researchers from across the nation are set to run human test trials for developing dream-recording tech inside a Burbank, California, recording studio next summer

Independent dream researcher Daniel Oldis (pictured) said the team plans to use a mobile MRI to try recording the movement, speech and images from the full dreams of up to four sleeping subjects

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'This is like the early years of the space race. But in this case, we're going into the dream space,' Oldis said.

The team plans to use a mobile MRI to try recording the movement, speech and images from the full dreams of up to four sleeping subjects.

In 2017, Oldis teamed up with the University of Texas at Austin's Cognitive Neuroscience Lab to track dreamers' motor behavior.

They succeeded in recording the movements of a subject's dreams by using an electromyogram (EGM) to gauge nerve impulses to the muscles.

In 2017, Oldis teamed up with the University of Texas at Austin's Cognitive Neuroscience Lab to track dreamers' motor behavior. They succeeded in recording the movements of a subject's dreams by using an electromyogram (EGM) to gauge nerve impulses to the muscles. Oldis presented an animated demo of the experiment at the International Association for the Study of Dreams' 34th Annual International Conference in Anaheim, California in June of 2017

Those recordings allowed Oldis to turn himself into a walking avatar. He presented an animated demo of the experiment at the International Association for the Study of Dreams' 34th Annual International Conference in Anaheim, California, in June of 2017.

Recording movement is one thing, but transmitting and recording images from a person's sleeping subconscious mind is something else entirely.

Oldis estimates it could take another 10 to 20 years for people to actually record a full dream movie, but a group of Japanese sleep researchers recently crossed a significant milestone.

In 2017, neuroscientist Yukiyasu Kamitani led a team of Kyoto University researchers who used human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) patterns to reconstruct low-level 'deep images' from a waking person's mind.

'When they think of an owl, for example, the vague shape of an owl can be seen,' Love explained in a Wednesday Medium post on the topic.

In the 1991 apocalyptic sci-fi film 'Until the End of the World', a virtual reality (VR) headset-like device is developed that gives blind people a form of sight, but the device is transformed into a tool that records dreams, bringing a darker side of humanity to light,

A set photo from the movie 'Inception' (2010), one of many science fiction movies that have explored the concept of controlling people's dreams over the years

Dr. Rubin Naiman, a sleep and dream expert with the University of Arizona's Center for Integrative Medicine, has expressed concerns about Oldis' dream recording experiments

Incredibly, the Kyoto team managed to build a brain-simulating computer called a deep neural network (DNN) that can pull data from different levels of the brain's visual system, from simple light visuals to more detailed images such as human faces.

Their DNN reconstructed those layers to remake images from the brain, according to Love.

Oldis' team hasn't worked with Kamitani's yet, but they plan to use a comparable technique to reproduce lucid dream visuals, dreams in which the dreamer is aware and can control their dream.

Oldis has focused on the how of dream recording so far. Other dream researchers are concerned about the why as well as the potential ethical ramifications of creating such technology.

'There's something demonic in what he's doing,' Dr. Rubin Naiman, a sleep and dream expert with the University of Arizona's Center for Integrative Medicine, told Love.

'I don't mean that literally — I respect what he's doing … But the downside to it is there are so many attempts to represent the dream in waking life rather than to enter the dream directly. The way we approach dreaming is we pull the fish out of water. But eventually we want to learn to breathe underwater, don't we?'